Walter Peters, or more correctly Dr Walter Peters as the guy has a PhD in experimental psychology, is a trader, author and educator who teaches people how to trade more successfully.
He specializes in trading Forex, and when he is not doing that, he creates online trading programs that have a global reach.
Early years
Walter Peters started Forex trading in the late 1990s when most of his contemporaries were trading internet stocks, or as he describes it, “riding the bubble”. With a first degree in statistics and a doctorate in experimental psychology, he considers his forte to be decision making. However, his first job was in San Francisco as a Jury Consultant.
In the US, Jury Consultants get involved in big court cases and help attorneys select jurors and predict juror behavior. He thought at the time that it was the best job in the world, that is until a long-term friend persuaded him to quit his job, move to Beverley Hills and learn how to trade Forex.
This change of direction was all before online trading became available, so his initial trades were made in person, though, he says, he “sucked” at it. However, he did learn that it is essential to find your personal niche rather than copying what someone else was good at.
Trading and surfing in Sydney
Next, after selling all his possessions, he moved to Australia, which he also loved, particularly as the time zones meant that he could trade London markets from 4.00 pm. while having the rest of the day free to go surfing.
During his first year in Australia, he read every book on trading he could get his hands on. That helped him become a “break-even” trader, but he still needed a job to survive.
What changed his trading was working on his psychology and mode of thinking. He warns against believing there is some secret system that will help you make money; it doesn’t exist.
What matters is working on yourself and setting a high bar. Your attitude to money is also crucial – you need to feel good about wanting to make a lot of it and lose the guilt about wanting to get rich. Another valuable trait is the ability to pick yourself up and start again after a failure, which is a trait he admires in Donald Trump.
Passing on the knowledge
Walter Peters has taught and mentored many traders, and some have become highly successful. What separates those who succeed from those that never make it is the willingness to put in the work. It is all about hard work and back-testing every system before using it to trade.
It can be challenging, laborious work, but worth it once you see it is making money. Sadly, people who don’t succeed generally think they can make money quickly and fall into the trap of easy money. They fail to realize that Forex trading is a job and that you have to earn your money.
He is not a believer in the commonly held belief in the fight or flight syndrome people are supposed to have. It isn’t the most likely way of dealing with a problem, even in the natural world.
When faced with a major problem, most people neither flee nor take flight; they are far more likely to freeze. After many years he eventually realized that the only reasonable strategy with a losing trade is to flee from it as soon as possible. Fighting or freezing will increase your losses.
Trading on support and resistance
Walter Peters trades entirely on support and resistance. He draws on his chart support and resistance levels, which is the chart’s position where the price has reversed repeatedly.
He then waits for the price to reach one of these levels, which can mean waiting a long time. Once it does, then it is likely to follow a pattern, either breaking out or reversing.
His favorite pattern is the “Kangaroo Tail”- this manifests as one candle going significantly beyond the average price action. This can indicate that the market has tested a high or low point and subsequently rejected it, leading to a rapid price reversal.
Naked Forex: High–Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators
Walter Peters’ book, “Naked Forex: High–Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators”, has a four and a half star rating on Amazon, with 91% of its 441 reviewers giving it five or four stars.
Naked trading is trading without indicators, just like the traders used to do in the “olden days.” The book describes how, by focusing entirely on price, traders can rapidly develop a winning trading strategy.
In the book, Walter Peters states that all indicators are derived from price. It is something that many traders have forgotten as today’s powerful computers make it easy to create a wealth of additional indicators.
These provide traders with only temporary help in building their skills and ultimately limit performance by disincentivizing traders from listening to the market’s subtle tones, according to Peters.
Naked Forex also addresses the importance of self-knowledge regarding trading. Systems based on untested algorithms are likely to fail, Peters says, so it’s vital to back-test systems to discover their strengths and weaknesses.
The book’s other primary focus is identifying support and resistance zones – “Price zones provide the naked truth about market sentiment”. When a price breaks through a zone, it is a more powerful signal than any indicator.
Leave a Reply